April 22, 2023
The Charlottesville Lie
It’s time to stop allowing the left to rewrite history
By: Brian Almon
On the night of August 11, 2017, protestors marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, carrying tiki torches and chanting “You will not replace us!” The next day they rallied in opposition to the removal of Confederate statues in the city.
Clashes broke out as Antifa engaged with the protestors. The city council and Governor Terry McAuliffe declared states of emergency and the protestors were ordered to leave, however, police had been deployed in such a way that the protestors were forced through a gauntlet of violent Antifa goons. One left-wing protestor was killed when she was hit by a car while blocking traffic while two state troopers were killed when their helicopter crashed. This gave the media the headlines they were looking for and they quickly used the event to demonize anyone to the right of Barack Obama. They called it a “deadly riot” instigated by “white supremacist neo-Nazis” and demanded President Donald Trump condemn it. He did – he said “…the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists… should be condemned totally.”
It wasn’t good enough. Since Trump had previously said that there were “very fine people on both sides,” the media deliberately fudged it, telling people that Trump called the neo-Nazis very fine people.
The lie that Trump refused to condemn neo-Nazis spread around the world. Joe Biden pointed to that lie as the reason for running for president in 2019. To this day, journalists still maintain that Trump called neo-Nazis very fine people.
The reason for this journalistic malfeasance was because Trump identified the same thing that the protestors did, that this was about more than tearing down Confederate statues. Mainstream Republicans often try to split hairs by agreeing to take down Confederate monuments while maintaining reverence for our Founding Fathers. Both Trump and the Charlottesville protestors realized that the intent was to demonize both groups, in fact, to attack all conservatives, European-Americans, and essentially white people in general.
“You will not replace us,” was the chant on the night of the tiki torch march. This is referring to what some have called the Great Replacement, a plan to systematically replace European populations with migrants from Asia, Africa, and South America. According to corporate media, anyone invoking this plan, from the Charlottesville marchers to Tucker Carlson, is guilty not only of racism but of conjuring up a baseless, racist, conspiracy theory. On the other hand, they laud anyone who celebrates the upcoming minority status of European-Americans. You see, in the media, the truth or falsehood of the theory depends on whether or not you want it to happen. Michael Anton calls this the celebration parallax. “It’s not happening, and it’s good that it is.”
Trump was right – they were never going to stop with Confederate statues. They have already come for Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and even the Great Emancipator himself, Abraham Lincoln. The point is not to redress historic wrongs, rather it is to demonstrate that America has been conquered, no different than when the Babylonians destroyed the Temple of Israel or when the Romans razed Carthage and salted the earth.
That is why it is time to stop accepting the leftist lies about Charlottesville. In the last two years we have watched the Biden regime turn the unauthorized tour of the Capitol on January 6th into their own Reichstag Fire, using it as a pretext to crack down on Trump and his supporters throughout the nation. They followed the same script in Charlottesville, highlighting a few cherry-picked images and incidents to demonize everyone on the right. Contrast that with the way media has covered Antifa and BLM riots for the past three or four years.
I’m not saying there weren’t unsavory characters there that day. I have no use for people like Baked Alaska, Christopher Cantwell, or Richard Spencer, and find both their views and their methods unpalatable. But it has long been an American ideal that we defend the right to free speech for people we disagree with. Those marchers did not have freedom of speech that day, rather they were ambushed by left-wing paramilitaries operating with the tacit approval of state and city governments.
When James Fields hit and killed a counter-protestor who was stopping traffic, he was convicted and sentenced to more than four hundred years in prison–not because of the crime itself, but because of who he was and why he was there. The judge wanted to make an example of him, to punish him for his racism.
Many on the left say that neo-Nazis do not have freedom of speech, that certain beliefs and opinions are exceptions to the 1st Amendment. There has been a strain of censorious thinking since World War II that says the reason Hitler was able to amass power in Weimar Germany was because he had too much freedom to speak his mind and spread his ideas. If only, the thinking goes, he had been censored, imprisoned, or otherwise destroyed, then the Nazis would never have gained power, World War II would never have happened, and the Holocaust would have been avoided.
Some on the right buy into that thinking too. They might defend freedom of speech as an ideal, but agree that certain speech – hate speech they call it today – is beyond the Pale. Besides, who wants to defend clowns like Richard Spencer? To that end, you will be hard pressed to find a Republican or conservative willing to talk about Charlottesville. They saw the way the government cracked down on marchers, they saw the way the media crucified Trump, and they want no part of it. Besides, if a few neo-Nazis get railroaded by the system, no big loss, right?
Here’s the neat part: in the eyes of the left, and the system they control, we’re all Nazis.
Consider that Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes declined an invitation to attend the Charlottesville rally because he didn’t want to associate with actual neo-Nazis. That’s all well and good, but it hasn’t stopped the media and the FBI from treating McInnes and the Proud Boys as racist, white supremacist, domestic terrorist Nazis.
That’s the secret of Charlottesville: it’s not just about Confederate statues, and it’s not just about neo-Nazis. It’s about demonizing America itself and anyone who still supports the ideals our fathers fought and died for.
Low IQ journalists on Twitter often say that Antifa street thugs are no different than our grandfathers who landed at Normandy to defeat the Nazis in 1944. Yet even the most progressive WWII-era GI would be canceled today for having views that are now considered horrifically racist, sexist, and backward. Heck, anyone who believes today that marriage is between a man and a woman – the same views espoused by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008 – is called homophobic.
The truth is that Trump was right. There were fine people at Charlottesville. There are still many Americans who look at the way the left is systematically erasing our past, tearing down our monuments, and destroying our heritage, and they have the guts to stand up and say “No!” Yet just because they dared to air those beliefs in public, these people are hounded and persecuted.
The reason this is on my mind today is because this week, the Albemarle County prosecutor announced charges against three men who attended the tiki torch march that night. What are the charges?
…carrying tiki torches.
Seriously.
In 2002, Virginia passed a law against burning objects with intent to intimidate. The purpose of the law was to create a specific statute against the Ku Klux Klan burning crosses on the lawns of black families, beyond existing laws against arson and vandalism.
That is clearly very different from a group of marchers parading around a park carrying tiki torches. However, Albemarle County commonwealth attorney James Hingeley campaigned on using this law to prosecute marchers from that fateful night nearly six years ago, in the same way that New York district attorney Alvin Bragg campaigned on indicting Donald Trump by hook or by crook.
Even Dan McLaughlin of National Review, a fairly moderate neoconservative who has no sympathies for the Charlottesville marchers, denounced the charges as abusive and likely unconstitutional. He pointed out the contrast with the way in which protestors outside the Virginia homes of Supreme Court justices were allowed to harass and intimidate them, despite the existence of laws against that very thing. We have two systems of justice in America today, one for the left, and one for the right. If you’re on the left, you can get away with anything, even murder, while people on the right can be charged with anything. The law is not being used to police actions, but opinions.
Antifa and Black Lives Matter have had near impunity to riot, vandalize, and burn our cities; to assault and even kill innocent people. In 2017, Antifa and other black bloc thugs rioted in Washington DC during President Trump’s inauguration. While some were arrested, they were quickly let go, and even won a large settlement against the police. How dare they arrest people for arson and vandalism! Didn’t those misguided police realize that they were doing it for a good reason?
In May of 2020, Antifa and BLM set fire to St. John’s Cathedral and attempted to storm the White House, injuring dozens of Secret Service officers and forcing Trump into a secure bunker. Few were held accountable, and the incident itself has been entirely forgotten by regime media.
Yet Charlottesville lives on, because even though it was peanuts compared to the riots during the Summer of Love, it provides an ongoing pretext to persecute people on the right. Those who were not charged have been stalked, harassed, and threatened by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League who are eager to make examples out of such easy targets. Young men, most of whom were not neo-Nazis or Klansmen, showed up that day because they simply wanted to speak their minds regarding the erasure of American heritage, yet now they are tarred as white supremacists and find it difficult to live normal lives.
And where are mainstream conservatives? Hanging them out to dry.
I’ve mentioned before how the left plays the disavowal game with conservatives. They demand we denounce some truly extreme character, some easy target like Richard Spencer. Once we obey, they come against with a new target, this time a little less extreme, perhaps Alex Jones. This process continues until everyone to the right of Karl Marx has been canceled and ostracized. If you refuse to play their game, then you become their next target.
I would not be surprised to see Brian Holmes or one of his corporate media friends cherry pick this piece to say that I’m defending neo-Nazis, just like they did to Trump. I am not, no more than the ACLU was when they defended the right of actual neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois in 1977. This is not about the personal beliefs of the men who carried tiki torches in Charlottesville, but the way in which the media and political establishment have used that incident to justify ongoing persecution of the entire conservative movement.
You can speak out against the destruction of our heritage, the politically-motivated witch hunts, and the weaponization of our legal system without defending actual neo-Nazis or the KKK. (For what it’s worth, those really are just fringe groups that only exist to provide foils for the media and jobs for FBI informants.) It is important that we speak up and call out un-American witch hunts for what they are, even if the targets are outside of what we consider acceptable opinions. The mainstream right sees incidents like this in isolation, thinking it costs nothing to denounce distasteful characters, while the left uses each one in turn to tighten their grip around the window of acceptable discourse in our country.
Republicans who think they can placate the left by denouncing the Charlottesville marchers or the January 6th protestors are deluding themselves. Winston Churchill referred to this sort of coward when he said:
Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. But I fear greatly that the storm will not pass. It will rage and it will roar ever more loudly, ever more widely.Winston Churchill, January 20, 1940
Or, to borrow from German preacher Martin Niemöller, who regretted not speaking out about how the Nazi regime used Jews and other “undesirables” as scapegoats in the 1930s:
First they came for the tiki torch marchers, and I did not speak out, because the media told me they were neo-Nazis and Klansmen, and I didn’t want anything to do with them.
Then they came for the January 6th protestors, and I did not speak out, because I didn’t want anyone to think I was an insurrectionist.
Then they raided Mar-a-Lago and indicted Donald Trump, and I did not speak out; I figured I would let the legal system work, because I still believed in America and our Constitution.
When they came for me, there was nobody, no law, and no Constitution left to speak for me.
Note: A descendant of American pioneers, Brian writes about the importance of culture and about current events in the context of history. His work can be found on Substack, here.
